Theatre

There is a powerful poignancy in watching a child's hope morph into an adult's disappointment. But poignancy is a quality conspicuously absent from Alexis Zegerman's comedy.

Inspired by Seven Up!, the television series that famously documented the lives of several people from their childhood, this cleverly constructed play leaps back and forth between its characters' early adulthood and middle-age.

There is no such thing as an unsuitable subject for a musical - whether it is the Holocaust (which is the background to the forthcoming Imagine This) or child prostitution, the subject of Brett Kahr's debut musical.

It happened with 9/11, now its happening with the credit crunch. In the wake of world shattering events, every other play in relatively closeted theatre-land suddenly seems informed by crisis. So is Leo Butler's raw two-hander the first credit-crunch play?

It reunites Dave (Con O'Neill) with his wife, Joanne (Amanda Drew), 10 years after he abandoned her and their debt-ridden, materialistic existence in Sheffield.

First things first. Peter Hall's production is Kingston's Rose Theatre's first home-grown offering since it opened last January; Love's Labour's Lost was the first play to be directed by Hall as the RSC's first artistic director; and Shakespeare's comedy is thought by many to be his first play.

As Ralph Fiennes's Oedpius tries to calm the fearful people of Thebes, you could be forgiven for mistaking him for a more modern, though equally emotionally remote leader attempting to rescue his people in a crisis.

When the audience, muttering resentments, spilled on to the street at around 9.15pm, barely 45 minutes after notorious American comedian Sarah Silverman came on stage, one was reminded of that old gag, recounted by Woody Allen in Annie Hall: "The food here is terrible - and such small portions."

When Ohad Naharin was a child growing up on Kibbutz Mizra in the suburbs of Haifa, his dancer mother and psychologist father instilled a love of dance in him. "At home," he says, "we'd always dance."

They took him to the theatre, encouraged his interest in folk dancing. Later, he loved gymnastics and music. Regardless of what he was doing while growing up, there was always a fascination with movement at the forefront of his mind.